It’s a deeply unpleasant thing to be power-hugged. Like a knuckle-busting
handshake or a double kiss, it is an assault dressed up as a kindness

My face is squashed up against a stranger’s clavicle, my nose breathing in a heady mix of vetiver, fabric softener and something reminiscent of meatballs. Through the thin wall of flesh and clothing dividing our chests, I can feel my assailant’s heart beating. My arms, wedged beneath his, are flapping about like a rag doll’s behind his back. I am, I realise, being “power-hugged”.

While I had heard about power-hugging and witnessed it at award ceremonies, fundraisers and cocktail parties, until last week I had never been a victim of it. I say victim, because it’s a deeply unpleasant thing to be power-hugged. Like a knuckle-busting handshake or a double kiss, it is an assault dressed up as a kindness.

“It used to be that a handshake was enough,” wrote New York magazine, which carried a list of the most notorious power-huggers last week. “Now public figures have come to realise that to project likability, nothing beats a hug.” Jimmy Carter is described as “America’s first hugger-in-chief”, embracing everyone from country singer Willie Nelson to the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, and, famously, at the Camp David accords, Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat (Carter probably presented them with throw cushions embroidered with “If a hug won’t fix it, nothing will”).

Marina Abramovic also features, having crafted a performance-art piece called The Embrace and enlisted the help of Lady Gaga, who was filmed in a video hugging a giant crystal while naked. Michelle Obama is described as using her arms as “tools of diplomacy” – having wrapped those dumb-bell-honed beauties around the frostiest foreign leaders over the years, from Dmitry Medvedev to the Queen. And of course David Cameron made the list, because of those regrettable incidents with the huskies and the hoodies.

When celebrities and political leaders embrace a fad, the general public is never far behind. Out here in New York, where power-hugging was born, bosses are already cuddling their staff (either shortly before or after firing them), men and women their frenemies, and antagonistic family members one another, in a thousand fraudulent displays of solidarity. Because, done properly, the power hug is a masterpiece of insincerity.

Quite what you want to achieve from it depends on the basic mechanics you employ. Rap stars and any man aiming to intimidate a subordinate should butt shoulder to shoulder before engaging in an American football-style wrestle that is almost impossible to break free from. Megalomaniac females tend to favour the full-frontal hug with combined arm grip for the whole pseudo earth mother effect (unless white fingerprints are left in the huggee’s arm, that grip is not hard enough). And those willing to assert their innate superiority gently but firmly will go for the patronising power hug, picking someone either smaller or slighter than themselves, passing an arm over their right shoulder and drawing them into their thoraxes before beating them repeatedly on the back. American politicians have done this to great effect over the years.

All this talk of hugging has me wondering whether it has ever been a pleasant thing. In childhood it’s largely dreaded (all those great-aunt Agatha types doing that creepy beckoning thing with their fingers), and in later life it tends to take you right back there. Unlike a peck on the cheek, a hug can go on a very long time – and how many leave you with the dizzying sense of wellbeing that they’re designed to imbue?

“Ah – you’ve never been hugged by Bill Clinton, have you?” muses my husband, recalling a clinch he and the power-hugger extraordinaire shared last week. “For a few seconds, it was like I was the only person in the world. Then minutes later I saw him hugging another man with mutual enthusiasm. I was man-crushed.”